Constitutional conventions: best practice

World leaders say climate change is one of the most serious threats facing humanity. Are they right? If they are, who is going to do what about it? Who will benefit and who will pay? openDemocracy invites you to take part in one of the hottest debates of our times.

Climate
change is set to trigger dangerously soaring temperatures this century, forcing
many of humankind’s most vulnerable to migrate to survive. Yet the growing
global obsession with border security will stifle their safe movement.

Hydraulic
fracturing for natural gas or ‘fracking’ is one of the dirtiest forms of energy
on the planet. Halting its destructive impact requires regulation and community
control, but also something much deeper: the transformation of relationships
between society and nature.

When the rice harvest season finishes in a few weeks, fields in India will turn black as farmers burn thousands of
acres. This practice shows one of the
failures of the Green Revolution, with devastating regional and global consequences. A food-security-obsessed India cannot ignore these
issues for much longer.

The understanding of global climate change has deepened since the 1970s, in parallel with voluminous research into and clear scientific evidence of its reality. The obstacles to recognition remain powerful. But this, the 2010s, really is the crucial decade.

So familiar has the social economy of energy become in modern societies, so routine its extraordinardinary wastefulness, so toxic its effects, that the capacity for a better way can be missed. By questioning the how, why and what of energy use, says Rebecca Willis, new possibilities - of living, travelling, eating, working and buying - can open

The international response to the food crisis of 2011 is less energetic and coherent than during the last emergency, in 2008. Both economic understanding and political impetus need to be improved, says Simon Maxwell.

A high-level international report on how financial resources can be raised to help developing countries address climate change is a disappointing and politics-free compromise. Simon Maxwell proposes a way beyond it.

In a return to the putrid nightmare of post-Katrina New Orleans, Jim Gabour learns the hard way about what is needed to keep on the right side of life. First published September 5th 2005. Updated August 24th 2010.

"Environmentalism, which in its raw, early form had no time for the encrusted, seized-up politics of left and right, has been sucked into the yawning, bottomless chasm of the 'progressive' left." A personal, twenty-year journey through the world’s wild places and the movements to protect them is also, for Paul Kingsnorth, an education in the limits of a project that has forgotten nature and lost its soul.

A series of careful reports into the leaked emails of climate scientists provides a consistent account of the "climategate" saga. This allows a welcome refocus on the problems of climate change and the role of the IPCC, says Øyvind Paasche.

World Forum for Democracy 2017

This year, the theme is ‘populism’. Is the problem fake news or fake democracy? What media, what political parties, what politicians do we need to re-connect with citizens and make informed choices in 21st century democracy?

Civil Society Futures is a national conversation about how English civil society can flourish in a fast changing world.Come and add your voice»

Full coverage of the non-hierarchical conference held in Barcelona on 18-22 June 2017.